Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [88]
“Oh, my.” This was as close to foul language as Chortenko ever came, but it was enough to terrify those who understood him well. “I forgot to order all artillery units away from the city.” Thinking furiously, he said, “Perhaps we can work around that, though. We could—”
A servile messenger chose that moment to scurry into the room and hand a sheet of paper to Vilperivich. He glanced down at it, and his face turned pale.
“Sir,” he said. “Wettig is dead.”
“And Baron Lukoil-Gazprom?”
With barely a tremble in his voice, the man said, “Alive.”
The corridor dead-ended into a vast, extended darkness held up by regular iron pillars on which weakly bioluminescent lichen grew. This ghostly background flickered with motion. Kyril stepped into it cautiously, tugging the idiotically giggling Darger after him. Ordinarily, Kyril avoided the motorway as being too open and having too few ready exits. Today, however, haste was all, so he went by the most direct route.
“So you think me a noodle, do you, young man?” Darger gestured broadly toward the flickering distance. “As you can see, I am not the only one who is feeling uncommonly merry.”
The lichen-light was so feeble that Kyril had to stare hard to make out what Darger was talking about. With concentration, however, it became obvious: Shadowy throngs of ragged people were hopping, skipping, limping, twirling, and (some few) dancing past, all in the same direction. They were all mad with joy.
From around a bend in the motorway, light flared. An uneven line of bird-masked Pale Folk appeared, walking steadily, thrusting torches forward like prods to herd yet more of the tunnel-dwellers before them.
Their captives did not seem to mind this treatment. The torchlight threw up shadows on the walls above them that leaped and cavorted madly, as if in some unholy Neolithic Walpurgisnacht. It was an eerie glimpse into the murky hindbrain of Russian prehistory that made the little hairs on the back of Kyril’s neck stand on end.
There was a metal pillar almost touching the wall. Shoving Darger behind it, Kyril said, “Wait here. Don’t move. I’m going to get you a mask of your own. That’ll make things simpler for both of us.” Then he flung himself down on the filthy ground, and lay motionless. Corpses were not entirely uncommon down here. He did his best to look like one.
Above, to his intense annoyance, he heard Darger snicker.
The wave of people passed Kyril by unnoticing. One of them stepped even on his hand, but he managed not to cry out. Then, when the line of Pale Folk had gone beyond him as well, he rose to his feet. Stealthily, he ran after the hindmost of them and, wrapping arms about the creature’s chest, wrestled him to the ground. The torch fell to the side, atop a pile of rubbish, but the fire it caused seemed unlikely to spread, so he didn’t bother stamping it out.
Seconds later, he returned to Darger with the mask.
But when he tried to strap it on his mentor, the bastard pushed it away.
A murmur of voices rose up behind them, growing steadily stronger. A second wave of happy idiots was being driven their way. “Look, sir. What fun!” Kyril cried desperately, thrusting forward the filter-mask. “Why don’t you try this on?”
Laughing helplessly, Darger shook his head.
“Oh, don’t be such a prick, sir. It’s full of dried herbs and flowers—see? Take a whiff. Smells pleasant, dunnit?”
“Oh, no, you fail to understand,” Darger said in the jolliest possible manner. “What you propose is the stuff of bad melodrama. Disguise